


Stand Down

by AboardAMoose



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Anal Sex, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Healing Sex, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Bucky Barnes, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:35:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26666803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AboardAMoose/pseuds/AboardAMoose
Summary: The soot in the air from countless fires, thick, acrid, stinging his eyes and sticking to his sweat-slick skin. The dust coating his mouth and lungs, the dust that had once been Thanos and Chitauri and great metal space whales. Cries of agony - not his, others’, horses, human, alien for all he knew, all burning in the aftermath of mindless, ravaging violence.Then warmth. Not the rage of fire, but the gentle press of flesh at the small of his back. A hand, tentative. A voice, unmistakable, repeating his name in a tone now low and laced with pleading.“Stevie. Look at me.”
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
Comments: 1
Kudos: 97





	1. Come Away

Tony dead. Dead. Tony. It was a fact. Its trueness was ringing in his ears. Truth. Trueness. Or was that ringing his own heartbeat, his own blood? Could blood buzz? Had enough leaked out of him that there was space left over for it to vibrate in his veins? Was it trembling in that web of minute capillaries which nestled around his eardrums? It had leaked from Tony’s mouth, a dribble that would crust in the bristles of his goatee if Pepper didn’t... didn’t... he could still see it over her iron-cased shoulders. They were trembling, just like his blood cells.

“Steve.”

There was blood in his mouth too, now that he thought about it. That familiar tang of copper and salt. Some distant, rational place within him, the voice that spoke with the soft, curling German vowels of Doctor Erskine told him that if he continued to stay still much longer, he’d probably start to feel pain. Pain and blood. Twins.

“Steve.”

Another voice, one he hadn’t heard in years. From the before times. The pre-Snap times and the pre-ice times. Years. How to count the years when you’d lived the life he had? Was he 35 or 105? Tony had no more years.

“Steve.”

Pain. Pain as unyielding, cold metal struck his jaw. Pain as reality thudded into his gut. A swoop of emotions too overwhelming to distinguish and understandable only as pain.

Bucky.

No.

Steve slammed the lid on the pain, and turned away - from Bucky, from Tony. His hand found his ear and the comms unit still nestled there despite the number of his times his body had been flung through the air, functioning despite the lightning that had crackled all about him.

“Report.”

Voices, as tangled as the threads that made up the fraying rope of pain. Astonishment, laughter, relief, all twisted and knotted up in a blissful shared ignorance of this, exalting a miracle they knew not the price of. No Stark-patented snark. No sniper-sharp sass landed with Natasha’s effortlessly piercing precision. No careful, complex judgements from Vision delivered with reference to concepts Steve only half understood. They didn’t know.

Were these same voices rattling, even now, into Tony’s ear too? Sending vibrations through fluid and bone that would go without interpretation from that whipsmart mind.

The voices brought the world flooding back in. The soot in the air from countless fires, thick, acrid, stinging his eyes and sticking to his sweat-slick skin. The dust coating his mouth and lungs with each breath, the dust that had once been Thanos and Chitauri and great fucking metal space whales. Cries of agony - not his, others’, horses, human, alien for all he knew, all burning in the aftermath of mindless, ravaging violence.

Then warmth. Not the rage of fire, but the gentle press of flesh at the small of his back. A hand, tentative. A voice, unmistakable, repeating his name in a tone now low and laced with pleading.

“Stevie. Look at me.”

If he turned now. If he fell into those arms. If he allowed that warmth to cover him. If he let himself have the comfort he’d been craving for months uncounted in the fug of grief. He might never leave them. The walls he’d built so solid and thick, that he’d mortared into place with sheer bloody-mindedness out of bricks formed of the sentiment he named righteousness, and clung to white-knuckled through every attempt at intimacy or affection, through every moment that threatened to remind him of the depth of his loss, the walls that kept his spine straight through half a decade of grief and that loneliness... they’d crumble into the same dust that had snatched his redemption from him a second time.

He couldn’t concentrate on the hand, how it was fluttering as if uncertain of its welcome, how it might stop touching him, how it might be the thing that brought down the wall if it did stop. Or if it didn’t.

What had Thanos said?

Inevitable.

There was work to do. Carnage all about them. The battle wasn’t done. “Carol, Sam, can you check for survivors?” Command was as easy as breathing, easier. The words came to him without the need to solder his brain to his lips. “Wanda, Thor-" he glanced to his right, to the grim-faced God “-you and the Valkyries too. Shuri, Okoye, Banner, they’ll be sending the injured to you. Rocket, Scott, Clint - there’s a lot of volatile tech strewn around here, round up anyone who understands it and can make it stable. Nebula, your tattooed friend and the tree. There are a lot of fires to put out, think you can get them on it? Stephen, let’s get portals opened up to any hospitals that can take this many casualties - then get over here. Tony’s down and we need your Time Stone.”

The jubilation over the airways turned to squawks of dismay. The victory soured with two words. 9 letters and an apostrophe. He took that joy from them, and he’d done it deliberately, timed it purposefully after he’d given them instruction so they’d still follow his god damn orders. Happy now, Colonel Phillips? Is this the soldier you wanted?

But there’d been another sound. The crunch of metal suits snapping in his direction as they registered his words.

“Steve, you can’t honestly think...” Rhodey, his head so small in a suit so big. Like a child’s toy.

“Time Stone?” And there was the child in question. The child who had no more place on the battlefield than the children in France or Berlin that slept beneath blankets of poppies. “You mean there’s a stone that can turn back time?”

“What are you saying?”

All three of them, dressed up as Tony’s toys. Steve too.

“I don’t...” It had just been a thought. A thought his lips had voiced without the conscious engagement of his cerebrum. How could he know if it would work? He’d only just figured out how to record Bake Off, how could they expect him to... He didn’t... He couldn’t fly or make magic or summon thunder. He wasn’t as smart as Tony or Shuri or Peter or Bruce or Maria or Peggy or Natasha or Fury or Strange or even Antman. He didn’t have super senses or super speed or the ability to throw rocks in the air with his mind. He didn’t have any answers.

But the questions didn’t stop. Rhodey and Peter and Pepper were all advancing towards him. Hands outstretched in supplication. As if they thought he did have the answers. As if he could place the words they wanted to hear into their outstretched palms, as if answers to life or death and the time-space continuum were doled out as easily chips or coffee.

The voices in his ear had resumed their staccato cacophony. Demanding information. Trading reports. More questions. Endless questions. Their individual words were a smooshed up mash of indistinguishable nonsense but the expectant upturn at the end of each one was clear.

Pepper was looking at him with so much hope.

It was that hope which broke him.

For the first time in his life, Steve Rogers turned away.

And James Buchanan Barnes was there.

Steve’s 90 degree rotation meant the hand slipped from his back, but he grabbed out at the wrist it was attached to before an instant of disconnection could be allowed to pass. Never again. “Bucky.”

He shouldn’t be doing this in front of Pepper. He shouldn’t be swaying towards the man he loved when she would never hold the man she loved again. Never hear him laugh or call or sneeze or slam the door too loudly or swear when the stew boiled over or curse and moan and gasp as their bodies collided. He knew that loss. He’d known it twice over.

The guilt froze him with his hand inches from Bucky’s cheek. The maybe younger maybe older man’s forehead - already so lined, scored too deep for one who’d seen too few years up close, long strands of dark hair plastered to it with the filthy glue of perspiration - crumpled in concern. Blue eyes wary, scanning Steve like he was a book to be read, like the story of the last five years was flitting across his skin in close-set serif type, like he had known Steve for 100 years and all it took was the carbon-smudged arrangement of the superhero’s pores to tell him what he needed to know.

The hand that had been so close to cradling Bucky’s face still hovered there. And he reached for it. He enfolded it in his own firm grip. They were locked together now, left and right sides holding and behind held. Bucky’s lips pressed down upon Steve’s lifeline and Captain America almost fell to his knees. Then the vibranium hand wrenched the still-buzzing comm from Steve’s ear. Bucky’s own followed a moment later. Then his boot slammed down upon them.

Some part of Steve’s brain, some primal cluster of synapses that was primed and alert for threat at every moment like a fucking homing missile system, registered Doctor Strange landing behind him. Thor taking off, belatedly following orders. The flow of questions redirected, twisting and encompassing the former surgeon instead of the weary, useless, silent soldier stripped of his words.

Steve was free.

“Hey. Doll. Let’s get out of here.”

His hand slipped from Bucky’s wrist, down, until their fingers entwined. It was the last choice Steve was conscious of making before Bucky drew him away.


	2. Come Home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: references to self-harm and suicide

Something was different. Bucky knew it the moment the portal fizzled into nothingness. Instinct threw him down into a crouch. Physics wrenched Steve down with him.

It felt and smelt like home. The air all about him had that honey-drenched weight which accompanied dusk in Wakanda, the fertile scents of sap and rich soil wafting along the currents, alongside the sounds of sunset. The low of wildebeest somewhere in the distance, calling each other in to shelter from the creatures of the night. The cacophony of bird song, the land’s final hour of music before darkness blanketed their shrills. A symphony of insect sex, the thrum of bat wings and the aggravated yips of predators would not be far behind. But this night’s song was off. Missing not just its choir but its string section and the brass.

There were no children screaming those startling high-pitched shrieks, the ones it had taken Bucky months to train himself not to flinch at each time they were emitted by a game of tag or ‘wake the strange man’.

No goats braying.

No cheerful grumbling of families prepping food for dinner.

No faint note of smoke and spice permeating the smell of the wildlands.

The fingers Bucky had woven together with Steve’s dropped grainy, damp flesh in exchange for the cool carbon steel of his gun. Every instinct he possessed, every lesson on assessment, observance and surveillance that had been ground into him through 70 stop-start years of grim espionage told him that the land in front of his eyes was empty. The only movement to speak of was that which was natural. Animal. Plant. Insect. Not human. But he was escorting precious cargo, and instincts weren’t enough to be sure.

Bucky raised the scope to his eye to confirm, panning across the horizon in a slow, methodical sweep. He started with the sky. No drifts of grey that might indicate a fire somewhere between here and the familiar horizon that confirmed his geographical positioning was as anticipated. Further down then. The village. His house still stood. Bucky exhaled a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding. Secure shelter, somewhere they could rest without fear of danger. Steve had felt enough fear. If need forced it, he could have jerry-rigged something, but this was easier: security tech was woven into the wattle of his hut, capable of keeping threat in or out depending on his sanity at any given point.

Lower still, the rather more traditional wooden fences he’d spent a week in the burning summer sun erecting to keep his herd safe still stood but... he focused... parts of it had crumbled? And the other huts… Roofs fallen in. Gardens overgrown, no longer overflowing with neat rows of vegetables and fruits but a tangle of weeds and birds’ nests. Yet there was no sign of a struggle. No pots, stools or equipment left outside. Doors all neatly closed up. No sign the people who had so warmly accepted him into their midst had left in a rush. Or at any point in recent history.

In a burst of movement, Bucky swung back his gun and swivelled to stare at the man behind him.

Impossible to tell with the layers of grime, blood and Kevlar.

The clips which bound Steve’s ridiculous helmet to his head shattered beneath Bucky’s fingers. When he peeled it away, the newly revealed skin was innumerable shades paler than the ash-painted flesh that had been exposed to battle and slaughter. Golden hair clung to the cap’s lining for a second, hovered, then dropped in damp clumps back against Steve’s skull. Glorying in the gentleness of the arm wrought for him by Shuri and her team, Bucky ran his metal fingers through those strands, sorting them into place, smoothing back the shorter hairs at his temples... and found what he was looking for. With the light turning orange all around them it was hard to tell, but against the black of Bucky’s gloves... Just one or two fairer than the rest, not silver but white. He couldn’t say for certain that they’d not been there earlier that afternoon but…

“How long has it been?”

The response came in the form of a moan.

Before Bucky’s eyes, Steve seemed to fold in upon himself. The weight of the question forced him to crumple, until his head was hanging almost beneath his knees, his body no more solid than a tent in a storm and just as easily felled.

“Alright.” Bucky stored his questions away and ducked to nestle a kiss into that bowed head of hair. They stayed like that for a moment, crouched, Bucky’s shoulders blocking out the sky, hiding his fallen soldier from eyes that were not there. Toying with the golden hair between his fingers, he remembered a time when he had turned to Steve for such shelter, for such unquestioning protection and safety, a time when he was half-human and flinching at the dark. If this was his turn… “Not like this, hmm? Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

Once upon a time, Steve would have protested such mollycoddling. He’d have whined and bitched with every step towards the medicine cabinet, refusing help just to prove that he could walk unaided even if he’d been lying in the dirt in some alleyway moments before. That was many Steves ago. This Steve allowed himself to be hauled upright, and followed mutely in the path Bucky broke through the grasses, eyes on feet stumbling with tiredness.

Bucky never thought he’d miss that whinging.

At the waterside, they halted and the brunette surveyed the hunched form before him. There was something quivering and small in Steve, something fragile and frightened that had never been there before. Or perhaps had in fact always been there but never on show, always dwarfed by hard-headedness, ego and the urgency of the fight before him. Bucky knew what that was like. When the defences built up over decades fell away and left you a raw nerve in the dark, every unwanted thought like a nine-tailed lightning whip wielded by the devil himself lashing precisely across the most vulnerable points in the human body. Steve had helped haul Bucky out of that state, to painstakingly repair the mosaic of shattered masonry which had once been his mental shields, and he remembered what had helped then. “Get undressed and get in the water. I’ll be gone for no more than six minutes. Count the seconds for me. I won’t be longer than six minutes. Start now.”

Before a whisper of protest could make a dint in his resolve, Bucky took off across the field.

And his muscles immediately took the opportunity to remind him that Captain America wasn’t the only one who had just been thrown about a battlefield. Urgency forced his legs to sprint through the ache, accelerating until he was almost flying through the field. He was at his hut in fewer than 60 seconds. The security system kicked into life after another 20. When the forcefield rose, it revealed a single, circular room which triggered every instinctual alarm he possessed. The deserted landscape which had greeted him minutes before might not have roused anything within but this… The White Wolf’s hackles rose. Someone had infiltrated his territory. Nothing was in its place. A thick layer of sandy dust had settled over every inch of his belongings. The clothes he knew he’d left out that morning were gone. Boxes were set back against the wall, packed and locked.

Someone had tidied.

Bucky lacked the time sufficient to examine that particularly peculiarity.

He lost another 80 seconds to digging out his linens, another 10 to separate out the towels. He huffed a word of gratitude out into the air and wished it on its way to the people who’d chosen to leave them in place before scrabbling randomly about for anything that might have resembled a bar of soap once upon a time (how long had it _been?_ ), giving up and darting back to Steve.

There was one heart-stopping moment of panic when he thought Steve might have vanished. Then he detected a face just bobbing above the surface of the water, a pallid mask breaking up the stillness that otherwise perfectly reflected the firmament above. The rest of Steve’s body was suspended beneath the water. From this distance, Bucky could see his eyes were open, absorbing the sigh of violet clouds scudding across the crimson sky.

The night was going to be beautiful. Another snapshot of the total peace which had cemented what recovery he’d made.

Whatever Thanos had done, however his magic glove had fractured the world, it hadn’t been able to change that. The relief Bucky had found here when he was defrosted for the final time still lay so thick in this place that it was capable of being inhaled from the air itself and filling every cell in his body with the promise he could stand down, that there was no fight to be had for at least a moment. It was filling Steve too by the looks of it.

He took another 70 seconds to pull his own clothes from his body and drop them next to the red, white and blue spangled suit. His feet sunk deep into silt, stone and plant-matter as he strode through the shallows. The water enveloping his knees then his thighs then his waist was cold but warmed enough under the hot African sun to be comfortably distant from the needle-sharp frigidity of the ice.

As he got closer, he saw how Steve’s lips were moving, how he was counting as he’d been told to do.

Beneath the water, Bucky skimmed his fingers up the blonde’s flank, to his side, his shoulder, then cradled his neck to duck the lightest of kisses to lips that formed the words “…ndred and fifty-nine…”

“I told you.”

Steve hadn’t moved as the caresses slid over his submerged skin, but as the count came to an end blue eyes blinked rapidly upwards, focused and urgent. Words spilled over with such speed it took a moment for Bucky to discern them. “Five years. It was five years Buck.”

“It was six minutes!” The ridiculousness startled a bark of laughter out of Bucky.

“No.” Steve tilted in the water, until his feet were on the ground and his shoulder rose, smooth golden flesh shining and dripping above the waterline. “I mean the Snap. The gap. The last time I saw you. It was five years ago.”

There was that wavering again. That same unsteadiness which had overtaken Steve by Tony’s corpse, like he was on a tightrope and could fall to rocks on the one side or sharks on the other, like he was halfway between this world and another and the precipice was as wide as the Carina Nebula.

Not yet.

“Let’s get you clean.” The filth and the blood were the only things stopping Bucky from secreting Steve in his bed, setting the wards to their highest and most lethal level and covering him with his body for the next three days. “Tip your head back again doll.”

A moment later Bucky was scraping his nails through the patchwork mess of Steve’s hair. Scrubbing away blood that was almost black and dirt that was almost red with a scrap of towelling. Lifting his hands and digging deep into the grooves of knuckles and nails where the soot was most deeply encrusted, minute after minute of painstaking work. Down a calf ripped deep by some sort of blade, healing over with the serum’s unnatural speed. Over ribs that no amount of washing would lighten, mottled too heavily with bruising, almost certainly fractured.

Steve’s brief spurt of wordiness had dispersed almost immediately into quiet, quiet touch in the quiet water. Instead of bringing him out of himself, instead of the massaging of his limbs coaxing his mind back to life with the promise of a softer place, the promise of recovery, it seemed Steve was sinking back into himself. Becoming a man alone with his thoughts even though Bucky was right _here_.

But the thoughts struggling within him were not quiet. Steve’s body, that powerful giant of muscle and sinew that was becoming progressively cleaner, progressively more Steve was twitching and jerking – first randomly, then incessantly, with increasing violence as the thoughts within him grew too large for his brain alone to contain.

Surrendering to care and control of another was one thing. Dropping into a space so far distant from this time and this place was entirely another.

He was going too far from him.

“Where are you going? In your head? Where are you right now?” Bucky murmured his question as he dabbed carefully around a deep scratch that was still seeping sluggishly into the lake.

“Seattle.”

“Why Seattle?”

“I was there.”

Bucky mentally nominated himself for a Nobel Peace Prize as he resisted rolling his eyes. “Why were you there?”

“Couldn’t sleep. Had to help people.”

“Of course you did,” Bucky growled into a patch of stubbornly smudged skin. “For me, you only flew in this afternoon. They brought me the arm. Then you were there. And half an hour later we were fighting again.” He was almost there. Good enough at any rate. Time for a risk. “Then I felt my body fall apart.”

Baby blue eyes flew open. Latched on to the towel being offered to him.

“Unless you’ve forgotten how? What with it being such a long time and all?”

Mechanically, Steve raised himself upwards.

Then his hands were on Bucky. He was standing behind him, pulling him tight against his chest. The cloth made some perfunctory movements upwards, trailing water over his torso, his pecs, down the curve of his collarbone.

But it wasn’t about that. It was about skin against skin. It was about holding on and not letting go. It was about letting Steve bury his nose in his shoulder, inhale him. And then it was about allowing him to cry it out. There, in the water, beneath the purpling sky, where the brightest stars were already beginning to shine.

“Buck…”

“I’m here.”

There was the whine. The wrong whine.

“Tell me.” It was a gentle order, but an order all the same. He smoothed his hands up and down the arms that embraced him uncomfortably tight, combing the hair in the wrong direction as he did so, hoping the prickling would ground Steve just a little – here, here with him.

“You fell apart. The world fell apart,” choked Steve. His body still jumped and shuddered, out of his control. “I couldn’t hold it together. No one could. Not even Nat. She’s gone too. Forever gone. Not coming back. So many remained but… didn’t. This worldwide… pain and sorrow. Everything broke down and to rebuild it... Not everyone. They'd lost so much. There were... mass suicides all over the place. In Seattle, I saw them. The waste. They’ll never… That’s why… And you… You were gone again, again, gone again.”

The next words were incomprehensible, lost in heaving sobs. But it was good. He’d let a scrap of that grief into the world, out of his chest, vented the pressure just a little.

Enough for the moment.

“I’m here now.” Bucky rotated in the cage of flesh and bone and reached upwards, smoothing his thumbs along Steve’s jaw. There’d been a beard there that morning. That morning five years ago. “Here.” He leant up to crush their mouths together.

And then Steve was there. He was kissing Bucky back, and the tears were flowing into both of their mouths. And there was so much pain there that it stole Bucky’s breath as ruthlessly as the kisses. He’d never seen Steve so desperate, felt hopelessness so heavy he could taste it. There was so much loss in the whimpers breaking free from Steve’s throat. Bucky couldn’t stand it, couldn’t swallow the cries anymore, couldn’t take and consume everything Steve needed him to. Not here.

“Come on. Come on Steve.” His metal hand fluttered against the hollow of Steve’s cheek. “Come to bed doll. Come to bed with me.”


	3. Chapter 3

Uncontrollable pulses of adrenaline were leaking through every tissue. He couldn’t stop the shaking anymore than he could stop the grind and clench of his molars, the tension in his still burning hamstrings and shoulders. He lay stiff as a corpse beneath Bucky’s musty sheets in an attempt to control the muscles determined to betray him. Five years had robbed them of any scent but that of dust and time, stripping them of comfort.

“Are you cold?” The most familiar Brooklyn twang. As if this was a tumbledown tenement that should have been razed to the ground when it violated code in 1938, not a secretive African state.

“No.”

“Hmm.” Bucky slammed shut the last box he’d been examining and stomped to Steve’s side, towering over him in the gloom of the room neither of them had cared to light. Huge and solid, dark hair already dry and slightly curling in the sub-Saharan heat, eyes as sceptical as they’d ever been. His soldier before he was theirs. Almost certainly a dream. A dream that knelt and wielded the gesture of memory, caressing Steve’s forehead with his palm in a gesture learned from a long-dead mother, as if the serum wouldn’t burn a fever away. “Crashing then?”

What response could Steve give? He’d brought enough shame upon himself when he’d turned away from those who needed him. Leaving them inhaling smoke and grief and false hope while he escaped to drape himself out in the sun with his childhood sweetheart.

“Budge up.” Bucky’s growl nudged him as his body did, sliding under the sheets beside Steve. His face filled the void before Steve’s vision, all shadowed angles and unexpected volumes of facial hair. It scraped against Steve’s thumb when he reached for it. The grin he received in return made Bucky glow.

“I shouldn’t be here.” The words spilled into the space between them, without any conscious connection between brain and mouth. Immediately, the shaking kicked up a notch, just as autonomous, autonomic. Was this how cowardice felt?

Cowards certainly didn’t deserve the comforting weight of Bucky’s hand, settling into the dip of their waist, bringing their body close. Cowards didn’t deserve to be soothed, with long, careful caresses. Cowards didn’t deserve the engraved concern on Bucky’s face.

Steve curled away from the intensity that look roused in him, tucking his forehead into the brunet’s shoulder. He was already hiding from the rest of the world, why not this too? “I should go back.”

There was a growl of impatience from the throat beneath his temple, even as both of Bucky’s arms came up around him, turning him more fully in Bucky’s grip, securing him upon a slow-moving chest. “If they needed you, they’d send for you. That wizard guy knows exactly where we are, so does T’challa and Shuri. And if there’s anything really wrong, they’d just call. This place is still wired up, I’m pretty sure phones weren’t snapped away.”

Crushed into Bucky’s skin, Steve’s voice was muffled as he put up a half-hearted protest. “It’s gonna be chaos out there. People snapping back into homes they don’t own anymore, next to husbands that have remarried, into jobs that don’t exist. Half the governments went too, across the whole planet. People’ve died while they’ve been gone, it’ll-”

A cluck of Bucky’s tongue interrupted his descent. “Boy I dunno. Lucky you gave all those governments a ton of warning before you brought everyone back then.”

Steve buried yet more determinedly into Bucky’s well-furred skin with a groan.

“C’mon now, you can’t punch your way through all that, not if it’s happening all round the world like you say Steve.”

“But I can-”

“Nope. I need you more than them.”

That startled Steve enough to shift away, leveraging himself to peer down at the once-older man. His eyes had adjusted enough to the dark that he could see the shadow of tiredness hanging off Bucky, the bruises and grazes, the hyper-alertness in his eyes. Marks of a long, fraught fight that had left him in that strange space of amped and exhausted. “Are _you_ crashing?”

One dark eyebrow raised at Steve. “If I said yes, would you stay?”

Steve’s attempt to pull away was halted by the tightening of Bucky’s grip.

“Steve. Be real here. The rest of the world’s gonna be freaking out about there being two Presidents and people appearing in nuclear bunkers and shit like that. Who’s going to be thinking ‘oh where’s that guy in the spangly pants got to? I could really use a calming infomercial on saying no to drugs’? I, on the other hand, almost died. You haven’t seen me in years, but I haven’t seen you in months. I missed my best guy. You owe me one night at least. "

“You’re not playing fair,” Steve found himself grumbling. How was he meant to resist an appeal like that?

“No point saving the world if you’re not gonna spend at least a little time in it with me,” Bucky shot back.

A grin blazed up at him, and it was then that Steve realised the shivering had stopped. His mind might still be wrestling with itself, but it appeared his body had given in.

Just a little time. Just a night. Perhaps – perhaps – and if they needed him, they could call. It never occurred to him for a moment that they wouldn’t – they’d thrown him from war to war without a thought, without blinking, without a _break._ Half a dozen permutations of They had done that.

“There we go.” Bucky offered a murmur full of approval, and Steve realised he’d sagged down fully, deflating against the heat of the brunet’s chest. Could he just lie here like this? Somewhere along the way, his breathing had matched with Bucky’s, slowing, deepening, following the rhythm of his lungs as much as that of the fingers trailing lazily up and down his spine, slender metronomes centring him. River-clean flesh beneath his nose, notes of Bucky beneath the water’s scent. This could be his world for a little bit, couldn’t it? Tucked up close with one of the few men who could bear his weight without complaining, who had loved him before – before everything. Who could make him feel safe no matter the threat he posed to the rest of the world. Who could almost – almost make him feel small again.

Almost as if his mind tracked Steve’s, and perhaps it did, Bucky’s fingers transitioned from the featherlight, slow tracing of his skin to adopt a deeper, firmer touch. He rubbed more deeply at the muscles upon muscles that could be found upon Steve’s back, pressing carefully over bruises that were still to heal, following the flow of each strip of flesh strung between vertebrate. A vivid memory sparked between them, a recollection of a hated backbrace, of nights where a grimfaced Steve Rogers stifled sobs of relief beneath the careful comfort of Bucky’s hands, the only thing that could make the pain flow away.

And there he was 80 years later, doing the same thing all over again.

“Buck…”

“Mmm?” His voice was low, catching at the back of his throat as if he was already drifting towards sleep, but when Steve summoned the energy to tilt his head, bright silver eyes gazed back at him, awake and alert.

It was the permission Steve need to rise up in the dark, seeking out Bucky’s lips with his own. The kiss he claimed wasn’t an act tinged with pain, soured with grief. Just sweet. The kind of gentleness which came with loving someone long enough to know passion didn’t have to flame and flare. Knowing that there was heat enough to be had without a race to completion, that lips were responsive enough to something featherlight as something slammed together, that pleasure could be sharp or smoulder.

When Steve pulled away – far enough that their lips were no longer grazing but near enough that their noses still nudged – he whispered, “Thank you.”

The corners of Bucky’s eyes creased. “You’re in my debt now punk.”

That glint of wickedness was irresistible. It was deep coded into Steve’s DNA to rise to it, cells kicking into gear all at once. “What’s the currency this time jerk?”

“You’re really needta ask?” The drawl shivered across the full breadth of Steve’s shoulders, but even after half a decade of distance he knew well enough there was hesitance embedded there. Yet there was no need for worry or pause. Steve wanted.

Lowering himself back down the few inches of space which had grown between them as they traded insults at play, he found Bucky’s lips again. Soft flesh responded at once, a tongue darting across Steve’s bottom lip. Heat flared through the blond’s gut at once, and he whimpered at its strength.

Bucky nuzzled against him, a bristle-rough caress. “I know Stevie, I know,” he assured, between kisses.

It was a long, lazy trade of comforting promises. The heat between their naked, entwined forms rose gently, rising from steam to simmer as the minutes passed by in their hut moored on the edge of time. They could push away the world here. Even if T’challa did call for them, would they even hear it, losing themselves as they were in the shift and slide of skin? Hands created ivory cages, clutching and capturing. Legs tangled and entwined. Hips rocked, just enough, just enough to stir the softly bubbling arousal between them.

The heat of Bucky’s hardness was something Steve was bred to respond to at a level as Pavlovian as his response to name-calling and cheek. Yet each time he moved to reach between their bodies the brunet caught up his grip, transferring it back to his waist and distracting him with another kiss. His face was tingling, warmed by friction, his lips almost bruised when he reached for the sixth time and was denied. While Steve enjoyed the velvet-soft skin that could be traced and teased at Bucky’s waist well enough, it wasn’t enough.

“Bucky,” he whined in protest, shifting so their hardnesses grazed, rutting deliberately, urging a response.

Black-blown eyes blazed up at Steve. “You in some kinda rush?” He was flushed, the red spread across his chest, his hair splayed across the pillow, pleasantly roused and near-melting in the comfortable glow of it.

The bow of tension that ridged the tendons of Steve’s thighs pinged. “Five years Buck.”

Huffing a laugh through his nose, Bucky reached backwards, muscles on show as he fished beneath his pillow for a tub. “It’s a bit-” he shrugged instead of deciding on a suitable adjective “-but we’ll cope.”

As he felt Bucky shifting, his legs falling open, Steve snatched it up. “You sure?”

“I want you inside me.”

Steve growled at the tidal wash of arousal through his core.

After all this time, it turned out he could still play Bucky like his own personal instrument. A slide of Steve’s first finger made Bucky flex, the second arch. A press just so and his breath stuttered, a twist and air punched from him, a relentless grind and he whined, a stretch and he lived up to his name. When Steve pressed a third inside, Bucky groaned. “I’m ready.”

For all Steve’s eidetic memory, he had never been able to lock this into his memory. When he summoned the ghost of Bucky’s hands upon him, the remembered sounds were never as sweet as this. Nor as maddening. Within moments Steve was slicking up, hooking Bucky’s ankles over his shoulders and pushing home. Bucky’s hand flew to cradle the blond’s neck as the tip breached him.

“Slow doll,” he hissed.

“You okay?” Steve asked, fingertips hovering over the curves of Bucky’s hipbones, nervous even of grasping him too tight.

“Mmm-hmm.” Bucky was shifting, adjusting, but a muddled smile was twisting his lips. “I just wanna enjoy this. Make it last.”

Concern melted away and Steve laughed as he pressed a little further into the molten heat. Muscles resisted, but Bucky was bearing down to welcome him, cracked groans erupting from deep within his stomach. His eyes fluttering closed as he focused on the sensation of Steve inching his way inside.

“Yeah, so good, you’re so good Stevie, just like that,” Bucky whispered. “Missed this, mmh!”

The effort of holding back had Steve sweating. He was being held so well, squeezed so tight, and when praised dripped from Bucky’s lips like that… When he finally bottomed out, balls nestling against the fur of Bucky’s arse, he couldn’t help his own mournful cry. He never thought he’d have this, not ever again.

Cold fingers traced Steve’s cheek. “C’mere.” Bucky tugged at the back of Steve’s neck, bringing him low enough to kiss. Bucky’s legs found Steve’s waist, dipping off his shoulders and the change in angle sent a rage of pleasure through them both, grazing Bucky’s prostate and sending his muscles clenching. “There we go,” Bucky sighed as Steve experimented with his first, gentle thrust.

It spiralled from there. Bucky directed Steve’s rhythm, urging him to remain slow, lazy and luxuriating in heat and pressure, sinking deep and staying there for long moments before rolling his hips in gentle waves again. Perspiration dripped from the tips of blonde hair onto Bucky’s chest, his chin, his forehead, as Steve moved above him, keeping the coiled power in his muscles in check. But it was worth it to watch Bucky descend into shivers of pleasure, until he was trembling and jolting with each thrust. To have Bucky break into pieces beneath him in the best possible way.

It might have been hours. It might have been lifetimes. Time seemed not to matter in the cocoon of their arms. The count of seconds was replaced with the breathy, punched out grunts Bucky made with each roll of Steve’s hips, grinding deep into him, just deep enough. Two entwined supersoldiers, superhuman equivalents of perpetual motion machines, lost in their own pleasure, roused by the other’s, unwilling to let either end. If whispers passed between them, lovers promises in the dark, neither passing nightbird nor returning Wakandan could tell. If the moisture pebbling their skin was sweat or tears, neither could swear, just as neither could divine who broke the spell first.

Whose hands turned bone-white as they gripped the other in bruising desperation.

Whose cries, muffled in the crook of the other’s neck, cracked first, giving voice to a wellspring of need.

Who squeezed and tightened and shook, urging the other to hurry, to race for the fire-bright stillness of completion.

But it was certainly Bucky who clung to Steve, jerking and whisperclose to completion, who begged into the gloom. “Don’t go tomorrow. Stay – ah! Stay with me.”

And it was Steve who moaned, burying himself as close as it was possible to be and still driving his hips forwards, “God Buck. It’s all I want, don’t you know that?”

The next moments were a racing fury of nails and teeth, of broken skin and broken cries, of a race towards a long-promised end.

“Stay!”

“Bucky.”

“Steve please.”

“I’m here.”

“Stay.”

“Yes.”


End file.
